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What’s coming in WPF Property Grid 2.0?

Tagged as News, Products, WPF Property Grid

It’s been a few months since we shipped the first version of the WPF Property Grid, and as you’ll know if you’ve been using the nightly builds, we’ve added quite a few features in that time in response to the great customer feedback and suggestions we’ve been getting. We’re now on the point of wrapping those up into version 2.0 of the WPF Property Grid so I thought I’d jot down a few highlights.

Multiple selected objects

Sometimes it’s useful to be able to show and edit the properties of multiple objects at the same time. WPF Property Grid 2.0 supports this, showing only those properties which exist across all the objects, and showing values only where they are consistent across all the objects. Users can edit the values and thereby affect all the objects at the same time.

Custom visual styles

One of the cool features of WPF is its extensive support for styling, and version 1 of the grid included some samples of cool custom UIs for the grid. (It also included one sample of a bright orange animated UI for the grid, but the less said about that the better.) In version 2 we’re going beyond providing samples, and including three comprehensive, fully supported custom visual styles out of the box so that you can give the grid a modern, WPF-ish feel with just one line of XAML. These aren’t complete yet but here’s a quick preview of how one of them is coming along:

All editions (not just Enterprise) will include the XAML source code for these styles so you can easily use them as a starting point for your own custom styles.

Browser application (XBAP) compatible

We’ve eliminated some of the code access security requirements of version 1, so that the grid can now run in partial trust scenarios such as ClickOnce applications and XAML browser applications (XBAPs), including from the Internet zone.

Custom type descriptors and type converters

We’ve improved support for custom type descriptors (which allow you to add properties to, or remove properties from, an object) and for custom type converters (particularly around standard values).

Sorting and grouping

We’ve made it possible to set up sorting and grouping via XAML, and we’ve predefined a couple of standard sorting and grouping strategies, so that you can sort alphabetically and group by category (a la Windows Forms) without having to write any code yourself.

There’s a host of other smaller features and fixes as well, including helpers for showing a description panel, localisation improvements and type editor support for value types.

Why tell you now what’s coming up?

Firstly, as we add things to the WPF Property Grid for the 2.0 release, they become available to customers in the nightly builds. So if you’re using a recent nightly you’ve already got most of this stuff albeit in beta form.

Secondly, we hope to make potential new users aware of what they’ll be getting if they become a customer now. WPF Property Grid 2.0 will be a free upgrade for existing customers, so if you buy today you can start using these features as soon as they become available. To start working with some of these features download the latest nightly build here (or customers can download the latest nightly build of their licensed version from the store).

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 25 August 2008

One Response to “What’s coming in WPF Property Grid 2.0?”

1. We are unable to download the licensed version of the latest nightly build. The latest nightly build we see is from 05-08-2008 (DD-MM-YYYY).

   We have the enterprise license, in case that matters …

   Best regards,

   Jan van de Pol

   Jan van de Pol Aug 28th, 2008

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